Frank McCourt11: I had typhoid. Yeah

Frank McCourt: I had typhoid. Yeah, because there was a lavatory that we all shared in this lane. All the families came and emptied their buckets. They used the bucket in the house, in the bedroom, for everything, and then emptied it into this lavatory. And it would overflow and there was waste, dirt, pee, piss, excrement everywhere. Flies, rats, everything coming to -- were attracted to this lavatory. And our door would be open and our door was catty corner with the door of this lavatory. We could hear them coming. We'd say, "Oh, God, shut the door. Shut the door. Bonnie Sexton is coming with her bucket." And she had the worst bucket in the lane. We became connoisseurs of the stink. So the flies would go in there, and they'd come in and they'd settle on the sugar bowl that we had. When we had jam, they'd be lapping at the jam, and I got typhoid fever out of it. And in those days they didn't have the medicines, or if they had them they weren't available to the likes of me. So I spent three-and-a-half months in the hospital in the summer, which nearly killed me.
If you're going to get sick, when you're a kid, you want to be sick during the school year. I was very bitter to have to spend the summer in the hospital: June, July, August, September and into the middle of October

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